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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25734 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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The New Law actually was a practical mechanism for bringing Gentiles in the fold of Yahweh. Conversion would be quite difficult if you demanded they get circumcised and are unable to eat their traditional diet or at the tables of their pagan neighbors. It was Paul's innovation of the New Law that allowed Christianity to flourish.

This did not stop Islam.

That's because Islam spreads by conquest, not by evangelism. They don't ask you nicely if you'd like to convert, they kill you if you don't.

The early Islamic conquests definitely didn't do that (unless you were pagan). Hence people of the book and all that. Most of the Middle East was Christian until the early modern period.

And places like Indonesia did convert by evangelism.

Christianity also spread this way throughout much of history. Germany, Spain, and South and Central America aren't Christian because of gentle proselytism.

Spain has been majority Christian since the Roman Empire; thé caliphate failed at converting the majority of the population.

It’s fair to see the inquisition as ethnic cleansing of the former occupying elite, but not mass conversions- because there simply weren’t a huge number of Muslims or Jews.

I'm not going to pretend I have a definitive answer to this or that I have direct access to primary sources, but I will say your assertion doesn't square with the histories I've read - there I've seen claims that somewhere between 50-80% of the population of al-Andalus were either Iberian converts or muslim transplants from the arabic world/the maghreb, particularly so in the southern bits around Cordoba and Granada. What sources do you have that claim otherwise?

I dislike Islam as much as the next Christian, but Islam doesn't exclusively spread by conquest. For example its spread to Indonesia (the largest Islamic country in the world) was largely done through trade and evangelism.

Different people different circumstances. IIRC it was Paul who even said that Christians could eat meat that was sacrificed as a pagan offering. I'm pretty sure my auntie would have a heart attack if I served her steak from a cow that was sacrificed to Jupiter, but there was a practical motivation for this new set of rules, which came from Paul and not Jesus (Paul never met Jesus, except in a vision).

The New Law was an optimization for cultural diffusion of Christianity in Pagan Rome, and the rules provide enough leeway to have made it happen. Paul made Christianity as much as Jesus.

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